Examines what linguistic devices speakers use to make an entity salient in a discourse and how they re-refer to discourse entities moving in and out of focus. Speakers' center of attention was manipulated via a videotaped basketball game. Speakers referred to prominent entities as subjects; when they referred to them as objects, they repeated the…

Explores the attrition of different aspects of Swedish grammar. Empirical data from bilingual expatriate students are compared to data from monolingual Swedish aphasic patients. The students' noun phrase morphology had undergone attrition, but not their word order. For the aphasics, word order attrition was combined with unaffected noun phrase…

The experiments reported here were designed to investigate the influence of stress typicality during speeded grammatical classification of disyllabic English words by native and non-native speakers. Trochaic nouns and iambic verbs were considered to be typically stressed, whereas iambic nouns and trochaic verbs were considered to be atypically…

Eight original research papers on Native American languages by faculty and students of the Linguistics Department and other related departments of the University of Kansas are presented. The titles and authors include the following: "Comanche Consonant Mutation: Initial Association or Feature Spread?" (James L. Armagost); "The Alsea…

Five original research papers by faculty of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale are presented. The titles and authors are as follows: "Measuring the Instructional Sensitivity of ESL (English as a Second Language) Reading Comprehension Items" (Sheila R. Brutten, John T. Mouw, and Kyle…

This study attempts to identify what mechanisms might be used to reduce gender bias in two highly inflected languages, Greek and Arabic. Twenty native speakers of Greek and Arabic attending Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., were surveyed for the experiment. The students were: (1) asked to read a standard job announcement in their native…

An investigation of the first language acquisition of productive nouns in Inuktitut (Inupiaq) is presented. This study begins with descriptions of noun incorporation, relevant aspects of the structure of Inuktitut, and working criteria of productivity. Acquisition data from Inuktitut and corroborating data from Greenlandic are outlined and…

A cloze-type procedure can be used effectively to teach interpreters how to anticipate what the speaker will say, inferring communicative intention. The exercise uses a text from which words are deleted, not randomly as in the true cloze procedure, but in significant locations or contexts. The words or groups of words suppressed are progressively…

The Kuku-Yalanji language is spoken by 500-600 Australian Aboriginal people on the coast of southeastern Cape York and inland to Chillagoe. The dictionary is of the northern dialects of Kuku-Nyungkul, the Rossville/Shipton's Flats dialect, Kuku-Yalanji, the China Camp/Daintree dialect, and Kuku-Jalunji, the Bloomfield dialect. It has three…

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "A Systematic Typological Contrast Between English and Portuguese" (Mary Aizawa Kato); "An Accuracy Order of English Sentential Complements for Native Speakers of Persian and Spanish" (Janet I. Anderson); "Remarks on 'Particle Movement' and…

This Bemba grammar begins with an introduction which traces the history of the language, stresses the importance of learning it well and offers hints towards achieving this goal. The grammar itself is divided into three major sections: Part 1, "Phonetics," deals with the Bemba alphabet, tonality, and orthography; Part 2, "Parts of Speech,"…

A study of overregularized use of verbs by two children over a period when they were 2 1/2 to 5 years of age shows overregularizations in two directions: non-causative verbs were used as causatives; and causative verbs were used non-causatively. According to terminology from logic, predicates were classified according to the number of noun-phrase…

This paper addresses itself to the way in which K'ekchi speakers identify the subject and the object in simple sentences. An attempt is made to determine: (1) whether K'ekchi has a basic word order, (2) the possible functions of any derived word order, and (3) whether there are any constraints on the logically possible word orders in K'ekchi. A…

Two groups of institutionalized public school educable mentally retarded (EMR) children were matched with two groups of average children for mental age (MA, range 60 to 80), and chronological age (CA, range 10 to 14 years) respectively. Each group of 20 subjects completed a modified cloze task. When performances were compared as functions of…

This study is based on a sample of about 100 languages with numeral classifiers. An attempt is made at reconstructing the dynamics of the process by which such systems arise, develop, and decay. Among the hypotheses advanced are the following: (1) numeral classifiers involve the overt expression of one kind of quantification, namely, counting by…